Julie R. Neidlinger: Lone Prairie Studies Blog

Segregating by age or status.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 2 comments link this post

I read a comment on a post at InternetMonk, and was immediately struck by the need to say a public thank you.

First, the comment, by Aliasmoi:

A single - never married - woman is a pariah in a traditional church. After I crossed my 30th birthday people started thinking (and sometimes saying) there must be something wrong with me that I haven’t caught a husband yet. They started praying out loud - in church - for me to get a husband. But, I couldn’t get within ten feet of a man without the whole church having to stop and take notice of the fact. I really started to feel like I would have been less of an object of curiosity/pity/outright derision if I had been married and gotten divorced.

I want to thank the people of my home church for making me feel necessary. Normal. OK. Valuable. Treasured. For wanting me with them and enjoying things with them. Not making me feel like an outsider or extra or some kind of burden to have bear with. Letting me pal around and talk and laugh with the ladies and be involved in the group discussions and hang out with the couples and talk with everyone of all ages...I just never felt unwelcome or outside. I want to thank them, essentially, for not segregating the church based on age or status. For not shuffling me off to the side because of my status.

When we were in the process of getting a new pastor recently, we had the opportunity, after a meal following service, to speak up about the possibility of a person who had been in church for many years being our pastor. Many things were said, most moving and good. I spoke up and tried to say, without crying (I did not succeed), a kind of thank you for the extreme friendship -- beyond that, even -- and how it made me feel valuable. How I wanted to stay at this church even when I didn't "feel" like it or when it didn't meet my "needs" simply because of the relationship of the people and what they were to me as the body of Christ.

Truly, they are Christ with skin on. For me.

I think, in a post where I touched on the idea of age segregation, the greatest sadness that settles in when I see it happening is that we are shortchanging everyone involved for the sake of convenience and logistics. It seems to benefit us, but in reality, hurts and robs us all. I can't imagine being stripped of all the interaction I've grown to expect with different people of different ages and status.

Frankly, age segregation is not Biblical. It is not OK to be pulling out kids and youth and separating everyone out by age or status. It is not OK to train them to think that they must be only with their own kind and should not be expected to be with the older Christians in church. Barnabas mentored Paul. Paul mentored Timothy. The older women are told to mentor the young. Why cheat each other out of Job 12:12? No, some barely matured youth minister aping the culture up front doesn't always qualify as that mentor; he is likely in need of his own mentor, too. There is also a need for everyone to experience the joy (and difficulty) of being such a mentor.

It is easier, I will admit, to be with people in your own situation and generation. You speak the same language, have similar angst, and understand your particular culture. I treasure my friends of that sameness because we can connect over the similarities. But at the same time, I have so come to value the advice and support and companionship of older women, married women, widowed women, single women -- my mother -- and have grown to love the chance to be that for the younger women coming up.

Because my home church is so small, we often find ourselves with one Sunday school class in the basement. It may consist of the older generation, some Boomers, me (the token Gen X'er), and some teens (Gen Y'ers). There are married and single and divorced people there. The discussion is rich and brings both the wisdom of age and the freshness of new eyes.

What a pity when we pull that apart by something age-based. There is no separate-but-equal in the body of Christ.

Labels: christianity, relationships, women, youth

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Who's doing the dishes?

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 2 comments link this post

I personally prefer to see the dishes done by me.

I'm very particular.

I wish to wield power, as a woman, over the level of cleanliness seen in a dish. This is my power play.

I'm only half kidding.

They. Must. Squeak.

I would let Monk do them, but that's it.

Why all this talk? This post.

It's interesting, but, given the circumstances in my life, I can't relate.

Labels: christianity, links, relationships, women

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Into pressure.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 0 comments link this post

I remember reading one of Monty Robert's books about horses and how a particular concept stuck in my mind.

Horses, he said, are "into pressure" animals. That is, they lean into the pressure, and not away from it. He explained this in terms of how horses would use this in regards to reacting to predatory animals. He also related a tale (all too common with those of us who have worked with horses) of a group of men trying to get a horse to move to the other side of a stall, pushing and pushing the animal only to have it push back and refuse to budge. An elderly man who knew and understood horses walked by and pushed, with one hand, the opposite side of the horse. The horse quickly moved into that pressure and, essentially, moved to where they other men were trying to move it with sweat and elbow grease.

Brute force doesn't win.

Any of Monty Robert's books will tell you that.

But the idea of the "into pressure" reaction is telling and useful when dealing with people.

You know, if you push me and push me and go after me on a topic, I push back. The harder you push and insist and become unrelenting, the harder I return it. I come back swinging. You'll never get me to go the direction you want by sheer brute force of idea, logic, or (especially) heavy-handed application of the Bible. Some people will, maybe, be moved. Maybe they want to be moved...I don't know.

But I won't be. I'll walk away and leave you behind before I'm moved, often becoming more set in my stance than before you attempted to move me. I simply can't abide a person setting out to move me by force. By words. By arguing. By insisting that they are right.

I push back.

My sister and I did some work with our horses using the Pat Parelli method; we spent a weekend learning to not be brutish with the horses, but to, essentially, convince them they were already wanting to do what we wanted them to.

You can break a horse. You can beat it down, crush it, and make it so it limply does whatever you want it to do. But it's not much of an animal after that; simple obedience does not mean love. Ever see a horse get turned out to pasture after a ride? Off it runs, kicking and bucking and rolling, only too happy to have you off of its back.

The trick is what that elderly man knew: gentle pressure from the opposite direction can move the animal.

So instead of coming at people head on, ready to push and force them where you think they should go, stop. Think. Come around from the other side, gently, and get them to want to go your way. Don't make them happy to get away from you and happy to get you off of their back; you probably won't get too close them ever again after that.

People, basically, are "into pressure" animals, too.

Labels: christianity, relationships

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Living as without.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 2 comments link this post

Dawn Eden's final post from 2007 (which I finally got around to reading) caught my attention: The future's so bride.

The passages of 1 Corinthians 7:29-35 have often been used as a kind of directive to let single people know that they are, indeed, not some mistake. The entire chapter of 1 Corinthians 7, frankly, often ends up being a kind of manifesto for Christian singles. Paul seems pretty tough on marriage.

"Look!" I've often heard, "You're better off being single, because you're not distracted!" They go on to list the benefits and freedoms of being single -- all of which are true to a certain extent -- as proof. They reassure us that being single isn't second best. "Paul was single, and he said it was ideal!"

Less distracted?
But wait. Singles, less distracted? Have you ever gone to an event where there were single members of the opposite sex? Unless a person has truly arrived at some place of amazing self-control and disinterest in attraction to the opposite sex, I've rarely met more distracted people in my life. I know too well how it is to, for example, be sitting in a church service and really focusing on the message and all of a sudden finding my mind wandering to the subject of the cute guy nearby and would God please have him move his hand so I could see if he was wearing a wedding ring?

I'm not alone in this. I know how it is.

In the midst of missions work and service and all these other things, the constant battle to push down the single mind that's not willing to admit it's looking to be un-single is a huge distraction. Obviously, married people have their own set of distractions as well as sharing some of the same battles as I've just described. However, to say that singles are, by nature, less distracted and therefore, it's just another strength -- that's quite a stretch.

Second best?
As to the constant reassurances that being single isn't second best -- I've actually come to realize I never thought that. Using this particular chapter as proof of that, however, is a little bit fluffy in light of the entire marriage analogy between Christ and his Bride (the church). Rob Bell's book, Sex God, was particularly interesting to me as he pointed out all the ways in which the Bible uses the historic concepts of a marriage relationship as a structure for what it is saying. I didn't finish the book thinking "Wow. I'm totally second best by not being married" but I did, at long last, stop listening to what has become the standard Evangelical push for singles to almost stay single and revel in their freedom through misconstrued efforts at not making people feel badly about themselves. It was in this line of revelation that I wrote the blog post "The Third Column."

We've swung pretty wide, from trying to make singles feel as-good as marrieds by taking a chapter out of the Bible and saying, essentially, that we are to feel blessed for our better calling with its less-distraction and more-freedom traits. I kept thinking that perhaps there was more to 1 Corinthians 7 than just ammunition in some kind of polite, patronizing Christian skirmish between singles and marrieds.

Which is why I really like Eden's post and her decidedly different take on those passages of scripture.

I used to interpret that passage as simply meaning that I, as an unmarried woman, could love God in a special way by virtue of not having the distractions of marriage. After all, grace builds on nature, so it would make sense for me to develop my love of God based upon the state in which He put me.

Yesterday, it occurred to me for the first time that Paul was actually instructing the married to go against their nature, to put God more fully as the focal point of their love.

In that case, it seems that the reverse of the saint's advice might be true as well. Perhaps my relationship with God is deficient because I am loving him only as an unmarried woman would love him. Perhaps, then, I might love Him better if I lived "as though" I had a husband.

What would that mean in practice? Thinking about that made me reflect on the way I imagine I would love God if I were married. How would my love be different than it is now?

Well, I would be grateful. I'm sure I would be more grateful than I am now. I would thank God every day for my husband, and for my kids if I had any.

So, in some sense, I realized, in my unmarried state, I am withholding a certain kind of love from God. I am holding back on a certain level of gratitude because I believe God does not yet deserve it, because He has not given me my heart's desire.

Perhaps, as Eden suggests, the passage isn't so much about two sides (married and unmarried) and the benefits of each, but instead, about the idea of living without distraction, of going against the nature of wherever we happen to be in life. Going against that nature so that we may more fully connect with God.

We are all distracted. It would be better if we could strip away those things that are keeping us from looking completely to God. For married people, the work of the relationship is a distraction. For single people, the abject freedom which quickly turns inward to selfishness, is a distraction.

Discussion: What was Paul saying here? Was it really just a commentary on married/single status? Or was it about something larger?

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